I'm interested in your suggestion that "moral reasoning" or that
"stage theories of moral reasoning" are approaches to Transcendence.
Certainly the Ethical Culture movement (Felix Adler) thought that "ethics is
autonomous" (independent of metaphysics), but that there are moral realities which
could be realized by reason, through diligent reflection and careful thinking and
analysis. Some have called Felix Adler an "idealist" and even a
neo-Kantian. Felix Adler was 19th century Reform Jew who went to Germany to study
for the Reform Rabbinate, but who left it intellectually during his studies, claiming that
the real goal here is not cultural survival of one community, nor the perpetuation of a
faith, philosophy, metaphysics, or worldview/gestalt, but the realization of moral
reality.

I remember working with the late Dr. Lawrence Kohlberg's theories when I was a
graduate student in Harvard Divinity School. Kohlberg was a professor in Harvard's
Graduate School of Education and a (quiet) member of the Ethical Society of Boston, as I
recall. www.AEU.org

Not everyone believes that there IS moral reality. Some dismiss Adler's
theories as "idealist" and as cultural baggage. But Kohlberg and Adler and
Ethical Culturalists of "the old school" could easily engage "family
values" people (such as Concerned Women of America) on important religious and
philosophical issues.

But surely the moral questions MAY point us towards an openness towards
"religious reality", but strict empiricists might not be quite so certain of
that.

Other sociological issues remain, of course:

* whether religion should be supported for the good of society, or whether, on the
contrary, religion is the source of misery and conflict

* whether religion elevates people and their behaviors, or whether, on the
contrary, religion is no better than the persons who write their own stories in religious
terms

* whether religion is so many millennia of insanity and strife, or

* whether all religions at their cores teach the sanest and most humane moral and
social values, or whether, on the contrary, religions are not all the same, and each has
its own problems which prevent further moral development

* whether light shines through all windows, or whether, on the contrary, religious
formulations are at best temporary BECAUSE they are temporal, and that these imperfect
formulas actually dirty those windows and prevent real light from getting through to us
and others.

* whether the social liberals or the social conservatives are on the right track
ethically and morally, regardless of the truth claims of their respective spiritual paths
and religious traditions and communities.

* whether religion is embedded in culture, part of culture, indeed a cultural
product, or whether revealed religion "judges" culture in the most stringent and
liberating ways possible.